batteries

General Motors is one of the auto makers working to reuse old electric car batteries, and in its case it is doing so with Chevrolet Volt batteries with one of its IT buildings. Using a handful of old Volt batteries from the model’s first generation, General Motors is powering an administration building in conjunction with wind and solar energy. This is due to the remaining capacities of the batteries after they stop being useful for the Chevy Volt electric cars.

Tesla saw ample success with its home batteries, so much so that you’re going to have to wait quite a while to get one yourself. It’s not the only company getting into that market, though, and we’ve known for a few days that Mercedes-Benz was planning to challenge the company. Today Daimler dropped some details on that plan, and officially began taking registrations from interested parties. The home batteries will be branded as Mercedes-Benz offerings, but whether the company will experience the same demand levels as Tesla is yet to be seen.

After speculation of such, Tesla recently introduced home batteries as part of its Tesla Energy division. These Powerwall (residential) and Powerpack (industrial) batteries, as they're called, are Tesla's way of ushering in a new future of sustainable energy, and they provide an enticing opportunity for those who may have otherwise been hesitating about switching to solar energy. During the Tesla earnings call today, company CEO Elon Musk touched on the topic of batteries, saying that the company has “basically sold out” the product all the way through the middle of next year.

The rumors are true. Tesla just "announced" that it will unveil new type of lithium-ion battery for homes and offices. In an email to investors, Tesla's Jeffery Evanson said that the company will use its April 30th presentation to, "explain the advantages of our solutions and why past battery options were not compelling.” The innovative car company also plans to reveal a second, "very large" lithium-ion battery for large-scale utilities. Such a sizable battery would be idea for doomsday preppers and those wishing to stay "off the grid."

With every new release of mobile or portable devices, battery life has been one of the most deciding factors for many consumers to adopt a device. While battery technology has been improving and devices operate more efficiently, there isn’t anything revolutionary that would give our phones or laptop two or three days of battery life. Google X Research Labs is said to be working on several new battery technologies - one of them is a solid-state battery in the form of thin-film.

Batteries. The lifeblood of our mobile devices and ironically also somewhat their Achilles heel. Although the evolution of lithium-ion batteries has made all these portable electronic devices possible, they haven't really caught up with the growing power that we keep in our pockets. That's not even considering yet the similarly growing obsession over thinner devices, which would require thinner batteries that deliver the same power. Stanford University researchers, lead by chemistry professor Dai Hongjie, might have stumbled on the answer in a new variant of an aluminum-ion battery.

When announcing something new, Elon Musk sometimes just talks about plans, or sometimes just gives his plans away. With Hyperloop, Musk essentially said he was too busy to make it work, and was just giving the concept away. A few days ago, Musk said Tesla had a new product category lined up for release, and it was “not a car”. Our minds immediately went to batteries for the home, and we might have been right. According to a new report, Tesla has been testing batteries in homes for sme time, now.

If you're looking to add a bit of smart functionality to your home but aren't interested in swapping out your existing devices, the folks behind Roost might have the solution. Roost is a 9v battery that connects your "dumb" smoke alarms to your WiFi network so that alerts are shuttled off to your smartphone, where you can see if they're going off and in which part of the house the detector is located. It also eliminates low-battery chirping that starts late at night, among other things.

Power: it's something none of us can do without, both the enabling and limiting factor of everything from smartphones through to electric vehicles, and it's ripe for a revolution. Hoping to lead just that is Gogoro, startup brainchild of former HTC innovation chief Horace Luke and Matt Taylor, and coming out from the shadows today to share a few early hints about its plans "to transform energy distribution" within smart cities. I caught up with Luke to find out more, curious at indications that some new power system potentially for EVs could be on the cards.

It's the question of our age: what to do with all those unused pay phone booths now that almost everyone has their own cell phone? Well, two entrepreneurs in London may have found the perfect solution, and it's eco-friendly to boot! Six of the city's iconic red telephone boxes have been painted bright green and transformed into charging stations with solar panels on their roofs.

Solar power is an important part of our future, but in many ways it is still too expensive. The Ohio State University has helped lessen that issue with a new device it created -- a solar cell that serves as its own battery, doing so using a type of panel design that introduces air into the "breathing" battery.

Lead pollution is a serious issue, particularly when looked at from the perspective of thousands of old car batteries that are increasingly unneeded due to changes in the battery technologies used. Researchers at MIT have developed a new way to recycle these batteries, and rather than creating them into new car batteries, they've figured out how to make them into very efficient solar panels.